I do seem to recall that, Gretin. That may make it in some form in the story when the time comes (though I dunno if I'll have
quite so many natives running around Rupture Farms as did in W@RFs 5 through 9.)
Sci, I wait with great anticipation for any art you may produce in the future
In other news, I did promise a little things about the creative origins of Dionysia and so here it is. I apologise in advance that it's probably not very entertaining, and is rather thin on the sort of details that make this sort of thing interesting. I won't be offended if people don't read it.
One year my uncle bought this hideous handbag with pictures of cats on it for my sister; from then on, all rubbish Christmas presents 'went into the cat-bag'.
And on that note,
Dionysia:
Conception, Creation and Characterisation
Dionysia is a dark-skinned mudokon, created by a group of vykkers who wanted to make a mudokon more trust-worthy and loyal to the Magog Cartel, as a weapon against terrorism. A dark-skin would generally obediently follow around any terrorist for a while until a critical moment when they would push said terrorist into a trap or set off an alarm or some such thing. Dark-skins are made by mixing mudokon DNA with slig DNA. Dionysia is a prototype model for the experiment; she was made specifically for study, so that the vykkers could apply what they learn from her to a male dark-skin. The term ‘dark-skin’ is slang referring to their untrustworthy behaviour; a finished dark-skinned mudokon would have the same appearance as a male mudokon. Dionysia’s skin however is dark, dark grey, so that the vykkers can keep track of her more easily.
The idea of the dark-skinned mudokons is a very old one, dating back to when I was still playing through my first Oddworld game (
Abe’s Exoddus) for the first time. Before I had even finished it, it was grabbing my imagination by the throat and inspiring me to write my very first piece of fiction. ‘Splat’ (which I started writing first, but uploading second) was the story of a mudokon named Splat who was used in an experiment by vykkers to make a creature to use as a warrior. As mentioned, the story was my first, and was a mix of many different ideas that had been brewing in my imagination up to this point. As it was a rush to get all my good ideas out of me, the story wasn’t actually that brilliant. But several of the ideas were for other experiments carried out by the lab that worked on Splat. Some of these ideas were rather silly; most were developed further on in the story or would have been in the unfinished trilogy that the story was a part of. One of them was never developed further, however. In fact, it was only referenced once…
“[The fifth experiment developed by the lab was] black-skin mudokons. They basically whined, growled or giggled when you talked to them then shrugged when sympathised or returned fire when slapped! Either that or followed you for awhile, then either started ignoring you or started shouting or running around madly at a critical moment. At the moment they all came out of the experiment with (you guessed it) black skins, which really blew their cover.”
‘Splat’, Chapter 6
As I said, this idea was more or less dropped entirely from ‘Splat’, and may have stayed dropped forever. There was so much in ‘Splat’ that when I grew up a bit as a writer, I was more than ready to drop most of the untied threads from the story and rewrote a lot of its continuity when I began writing the sequel. More than half of the experiments mentioned in that list would be forgotten after ‘Splat’, and ‘black-skins’ would be one of them.
Or so it would have been, if not for events that took place many years later, in the course of the ‘Work at Rupture Farms’ RPG.
I once looked at the RPG section of Oddworld Forums because they sounded like fun, but was so confused by the layout of the rules in those days that I quickly lost interest. Later on, T-nex, one of the people who read ‘Splat’ and a good friend on the forums, convinced me to join the RPGs. Basically, she told me how it all worked and then stood back. W@RF was one of three RPGs I joined in those early days (one other was just starting and died very soon) and I wanted a character that would stand out, without really standing out. I created the slig, Stivik, and decided that he would be a Magog Cartel undercover inspector. This meant that he could act like a normal slig while actually being somewhat more dangerous to Rupture Farms and its inhabitants. I had read some of the RPG before joining and had seen that the factory’s boss, Arnie, typically had his sligs be nice to mudokons, to keep them from thinking any rebellious thoughts. I thought that this was likely to cause him trouble and gave a reason for the Cartel to send an inspector.
All was well as I settled into the RPG and later created a second character, a mudokon named Jim (coming soon to a fan-story near you!), for (in my words at the time) ‘those awkward moments when Stivik is taking a shower and no one wants to know any more than that’. Later on, as the story progressed, it became clear that Stivik had surely collected enough information on Arnie to bring trouble down upon him, and some sort of retribution ought to come. Obviously I couldn’t have the firing squad turn up (as such sudden plot-destroying actions are generally frowned upon by RPGers) so instead I came up with a new idea; that Arnie would be given a troublesome mudokon experiment to look after as punishment, and that his survival would be tied in with the safety of said experiment.
As with most good RPG decisions, this idea came very spontaneously, and I instantly began thinking up ideas for this character. I wanted it to be an experiment, so instead of quickly coming up with something new, I dug up an old, fairly low-key idea from my old story. For reasons I don’t remember, except that I probably thought it would make for a deeper character, I made the experiment a female because I thought that it would make a stronger character (at the time my only female W@RF character – I was sceptical of female characters as of course there are none within Oddworld continuity so the choice of making this character female was a big one, justified only by her status as an experiment).
And finally I took the letters D and S, for Dark-Skin (a mistake, as the originals had been black-skins, but as I’d only written that once, three or four years earlier, I hope I can be forgiven) and a very out-dated dictionary of first names that we had knocking about the house and came up with a name that fitted with the afore-mentioned letters, and so Dionysia was conceived. I wanted her to be a trouble-making so I gave her an arrogant personality, and soon she was ready to go. During a particularly slow phase in the RPG, I brought her in. Her original RPG character profile was as follows…
Name: DS-P.L7 v4 (Dionysia)
Race: 'Dark Skin' Mudokon: nice genetic engineering job. Odd bless the industrials for all these interesting character possibilities!
Gender: Female
Age: Mentally 18 by human standards. Hatched 3 years ago.
Appearance: Skin is a dark grey, almost black (big shock). She wears a dyed red cloth wrapped round her lower regions and another round her upper chest where she shows particular female features. Like a normal mudokon she is muscular but less sinuous. Slightly taller than average, eyes are normal yellow and feather is purple, red and black and flows all the way down her back stopping just above her lower garment. Her lips are stitched.
Bio: The original industrial 'Dark Skin Project' was intended to create mudokons with the behaviour more like sligs or glukkons and less like scrubs. Originally the male creations came out with psychopathic inclinations to kill anything and everything. By version 7 of the project the experiment team realised a hormone necessary for a mudokon to grow was causing this fault. However, female mudokons created in the past never had this hormone and the vykkers, taking this into account, attempted to engineer a female 'Dark Skin'. The fourth prototype in this series was christened Dionysia by her makers and proved to be reasonably successful, if a little too Skillya-like for comfort. Not to be outdone, the vykkers decided to dump her on some poor glukkon who was causing a stir in the Cartel but no one wanted to remove from his job cus, quite frankly, he was good at it. Shortly afterwards she was shipped off to Rupture Farms with a private message to Arnie.
Dionysia (or Dion) likes to be thought of as threatening and a bit evil. She can be patronising and arrogant, or kind and supportive, depending on which she thinks will get the most out of the person she is faced with. Very nasty to people naive enough to cause her trouble.
Work at Rupture Farms (v.5), page 8, post 213
A short while later, I made another spontaneous decision; she soon met up with Stivik when he had finished dealing with what he considered a little complication of his own, and I decided that they should have a history together. To add some tension, I decided to change (or at least develop) some of the information from her profile. I decided that the vykkers had sent her to a few different factories to test her in a normal environment and in one of these she met Stivik, who was already a Cartel spy by now. They eventually grew some form of relationship and she trusted him enough to tell him her big secret; that she was made using Skillya’s DNA. Stivik reported this to the Cartel who seized her and used her to blackmail her vykkers into compliance; they could use her and the vykkers as they wished and in return wouldn’t tell Skillya about their secret.
This created some pretty awesome action between Stivik and Dionysia and I had a lot of fun writing their scenes together. Then, when Stivik left, I brought her in a new ward in the form of the power-hungry, sadistic Dr Krik, who brought out a secret, more vulnerable side to Dionysia’s personality.
She was developing in other unexpected ways in the RPG at the same time, regarding other characters, but to avoid spoilers I won’t go into detail. We saw Dionysia’s anger, her fear of death and of abandonment, her arrogance, her deeply buried insecurity and ultimately her unconscious slavery to the sadistic Krik and the medicines he provided her with. We also saw her intolerance to physical pain.
A while later, I decided to write the back-story to my RPG characters as a lengthy fan-fic. This gave me the difficult task of characterising Dionysia from infancy to her RPG self. I included the plot ideas I had had for her but not previously developed, such as the vykkers she grew up with spoiling her for her attention, her lip-stitching and the aging-drugs she was forced to take. I changed the name of the experiment that created her to the ‘Denial of Nature Study’ to fit my new idea for the origin of her name, which is conveniently made up of the capital letters, D. N. S. E. R. (not a fact I considered when I first chose it). ‘Denial of Nature Study’ fit in with the first three letters, and a bit of technobabble filled in for the last two, giving me a reason for the vykkers (particularly a psychologist with a liking of word-games) to give her such an obscure name. And so ‘Dark Skin’ became a slang term, instead of the name of the project. I also came up with the idea of the six silver rings she received from one of the vykkers, which tied in nicely with current events and plans in the RPG.
After writing Krik’s relation to her (and developing the drugs she needed to live into a plot by him to make a lot of moolah), I then got to write the long-awaited meeting between her and Stivik. Their relationship ended up a lot less close than I originally saw; they bonded emotionally, but still kept their distance from one another. To fit, I had Stivik work out her secret, rather than having her tell it. And so came her downfall.
During the writing of ‘The Despicable’ I wrote a new edition of her RPG profile.
Name: Dionysia (DS-P.L7 v4)
Race: 'Dark Skin' Mudokon: the original genetic engineering job.
Gender: Female
Age: Mentally 18 by human standards and probably early to mid teens in mudokon years. Hatched 3 years ago.
Appearance: Skin is a dark grey, almost black (big shock). She wears a dyed red cloth wrapped round her lower regions and another round her upper chest where she shows particular female features. Like a normal mudokon she is muscular but less sinuous. Taller than average, eyes are normal yellow and feather is purple, red and black and flows all the way down her back stopping just above her lower garment. Her lips are stitched.
Bio: The original industrial 'Dark Skin Project' was intended to create mudokons with the behaviour more like sligs or glukkons and less like scrubs which could be used as weapons against mudokon terrorists. Originally the male creations never lived passed infancy. By version 7 of the project the experiment team realised a hormone necessary for a mudokon to grow was causing this fault. However, female mudokons created in the past never had this hormone and the vykkers, taking this into account, attempted to engineer a female 'Dark Skin'. Using DNA taken (illegally) from Skillya many years ago by one of the team, they successfully created Dionysia. The fact that she is made with Skillya's blood means that if the slig Queen ever found out about her she and her creators would probably be killed. The Cartel does know her secret since Dion unknowingly told it to a Cartel spy, but they keep it from Skillya so they can take advantage of her and the vykkers who made her.
Dionysia is usually nasty, selfish and arrogant on the surface, though inside she's very insecure. In many ways she is more like a slig than a mudokon, showing contempt to other mudokons. She often suffers from mood swings and is less tolerant of pain than most people, is fairly intelligent but withdrawn emotionally, not trusting herself or others. She practically worships the vykkers who made her.
Dionysia will return in the first chapter of Part 7, and will come to Rupture Farms shortly afterwards. Rather more grown-up than when we last saw her, she will face a lot of emotional turmoil during her time in Rupture Farms before making a series of decisions that will change not only her life, but the lives of many inhabitants warring over the freedom of Mudos.
So will she survive after Rupture Farms? You’ll have to wait and see.